We Don't Like Yer Kind

I talked in one of my earlier posts about switching to Linux for my operating system, just to see how easy it is to install and use for an "average" user. For years the OS has been seen as something that only the more technically oriented computer user has, and many people (myself included) are daunted and confused when confronted with a command line interface (CLI). Over the past years, though, many Linux operating systems have converted to a graphical user interface (GUI) which makes things a lot simpler and easy to use.

While this is a great step, there's still one hurdle to overcome: having applications that can actually run on Linux. For example, my music player, Rhapsody, doesn't run on Linux. Neither do any of the Microsoft Office programs or Photoshop. While there are other (mainly open source) options available, they pale in comparison. It's much easier working with PowerPoint than it is with Open Office. And no other product even comes close to Photoshop.

A lot of this boils down to familiarity. Most people grew up using products created by Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Sun, and other proprietary software companies. And while it's easy to say "you'll get the hang of it," not many people want to change if they don't have to. iTunes works fine and has a great GUI; why switch to mplayer? Not just at the personal level, but a lot of the corporate level developmental tools don't run on Linux either. If you're a company like Fast Enterprises that does all their work in Visual Basic, you can't find a program other than Visual Studio to do your coding. To be fair, many Asian countries, and most recently the UK are making the switch because of the money that can be saved. But in the corporate world it's going to take much longer, unless software companies start making their products Linux compatible, or open source developers make programs that offer the depth, ease of use, and quality of their proprietary counterparts.